New Allegan sheriff looks to build community

“Everyone says Allegan County is the kind of place ‘I want to live’ and ‘I want to raise my family,’” Baker said. “And if the (Sheriff’s Office) plays a role in that, I think that’s what I want.”

By Caleb WhitmerSentinel staff

At the end of his tenure as county sheriff, Frank Baker said he will have wanted his administration to have played an important role in maintaining and improving the community of Allegan County.

“Everyone says Allegan County is the kind of place ‘I want to live’ and ‘I want to raise my family,’” Baker said. “And if the (Sheriff’s Office) plays a role in that, I think that’s what I want.”

Both Baker and Undersheriff Mike Larsen have been with the Sheriff’s Office for more than 20 years.

Baker’s experience has focused on the actual law enforcement side of what the department does. Beginning as a patrolman, he worked his way up to leading Allegan County’s detective unit until he was promoted to undersheriff by recently retired Sheriff Blaine Koops.

If he has a deficiency in his resume, Baker said, it is his lack of experience with corrections, which he said is where Larsen comes in. The first half of that path was spent as a corrections officer, in which he rose to the post of executive sergeant. The second half put him in leadership positions of the patrol and law enforcement divisions.

At the very start of his career, after he left the U.S. Navy and was going to school, he even worked in central dispatch.

“I’m glad that my path went the way that it did,” Larsen said, “because I can literally say I have worked in every single division in this agency.”

Allegan County has a number of municipal police forces. But, like the other predominantly rural counties in Michigan, its country communities rely heavily on the county Sheriff’s Office and Michigan State Police for its law enforcement.

Of the roughly 115,000 people living in Allegan County, about 85 percent of them will see a Sheriff’s deputy or state trooper when they call for law enforcement, said Undersheriff Mike Larsen.

This demand on the department’s resources spreads throughout the county’s diverse communities, from the tourism-reliant towns on the lakeshore, to the farming areas in the interior to the spill over from Grand Rapids, Holland and Kalamazoo on the edges.

“We have a little bit of everything,” Baker said, “so it makes it difficult. We have staffing challenges that most law enforcement agencies are facing.”

Even working between these dispersed populations, both Baker and Larsen stressed that the Allegan Sheriff’s Office seeks to operate under the philosophy of community policing.

“In order for a law-enforcement agency to be successful, it has to be not just a part of the community but a partner with the community,” Baker said. “Without the community support, we are not going to be successful. If the community does not support its law enforcement or the community does not trust its law enforcement, you are just not going to solve crime. You are not going to be effective in what you do.”

Baker and Larsen commented on the recent national conversation regarding trust in police following events like the 2014 shooting death of a black teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., or the killing of five police officers and injuring of nine more by a gunmen in Dallas this past summer.

Often following these widely reported stories, Baker said local law enforcement have shown up to work to find cookies or fruit or signs voicing support fo police. He said Allegan County has been fortunate that situations like the one in Ferguson have not played out locally.

“We are very fortunate in Allegan County that we do have the support of the community,” Baker said. “We are very appreciative of that and we don’t want to do anything to jeopardize that.”

Accountability, Larsen said, is engrained in the culture of the Sheriff’s Office. He said he has personally witnessed that fact as he has risen through its ranks.

“You don’t have the battles of people trying to cover things up for one another,” Larsen said.

The end goal of a law-enforcement agency, Baker said, is not to end crime, which isn’t possible, but to respond to it in the best possible way. In Allegan County, and for law enforcement across the country, mental health is becoming more of a consideration in that response.

Baker agreed, adding that the situation is difficult because often the training that officers receive for dealing with the mentally ill contradicts other training they receive: Whereas someone drunk and belligerent needs loud, repetitive commands to subdue, that same tactic could set off someone who is mentally ill.

“We don’t want to be in a situation where we are exasperating the problem because we are responding the way we are trained,” Baker said.

A shift in practices is also underway at the jail. Allegan County’s old jail did not allow space for much in the way of program geared at preparing inmates for life on the outside. Now, however, the jail is offering programs related to parenting, substance abuse, anger management and education.

“Rather than lock somebody up — forget about them and throw away the key — it’s remembering that they are somebody’s son, they are somebody’s father, they are somebody’s neighbor,” Larsen said. “Unless they are going to get life, they are going to be back out in the community. Our job is to make sure they go back out into the community better than they came in here.”

In the end, Baker said, law enforcement is all about fostering that local community.

“The more we can be involved in the community,” Baker said, “the better the community.”